Alva Noë is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and he was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s science and culture blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture.
His new book is "Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark."
Baseball is a strange sport: it consists of long periods in which little seems to be happening, punctuated by high-energy outbursts of rapid fire activity. Because of this, despite ever greater profits, Major League Baseball is bent on finding ways to shorten games, and to tailor baseball to today's shorter attention spans. But for the true fan, baseball is always compelling to watch and intellectually fascinating. It's superficially slow-pace is an opportunity to participate in the distinctive thinking practice that defines the game. If baseball is boring, it's boring the way philosophy is boring: not because there isn't a lot going on, but because the challenge baseball poses is making sense of it all.
In "Infinite Baseball," philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game.
